What Did America’s Founding Fathers Believe?

The Founding Fathers valued ideals such as personal liberty, equality of opportunity, individual rights, and the need for limited government. Although they shared many common goals, they had sharp disagreements about the best way to design a new government. They found inspiration in various places—personal religious views, political philosophy, and faith in human reason.

How Faith Centered Were They?

Numerous authors have written about the faith of the Founding Fathers with varying levels of academic precision and faithfulness to the historical record. Some writers simply count religious-sounding words in speeches and letters, using word counts as a proxy measure of personal piety. One problem with this technique is that most people living in colonial times were familiar with the Bible and the stories it tells, so biblical and religious references were part of everyday life. In much the same way that people today quote lines from popular songs or television shows, the colonists would likely have quoted the Bible.

Many Deists agreed with some of the general beliefs of Christianity, but they denied many of the specifics such as the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, and divine revelation.

In colonial America, as in modern times, more people said they believed in God than genuinely practiced a particular religion. The best (although imperfect) way to look across time to speculate about someone’s actual religious beliefs is to look for discussion of religion in private writings, records of church attendance and participation in sacraments, and evidence of other forms of religious activity.

The overwhelming consensus of those scholars who research the faith of the Founding Fathers is that few, if any, of them would qualify as evangelicals as we currently use the term. Some of the Founding Fathers appear to have held orthodox Christian beliefs, but most of them (including the most famous) are best described as Deists in some form.

What Is Deism?

In modern usage, Deism refers to a belief in a distant god who created the universe, set things into motion, and no longer intervenes. At the time of the founding, Deism was a growing movement that typically included five elements: “(1) there is a God; (2) he ought to be worshipped; (3) virtue is the principal element in this worship; (4) humans should repent of their sins; and (5) there is a life after death, where evil will be punished, and the good rewarded.”[1] Many Deists agreed with some of the general beliefs of Christianity, but they denied many of the specifics such as the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, and divine revelation.

Like the Deists of their day, most of the founders appear to have shared a general belief in God, the sinfulness of humanity, the need for repentance, and some form of afterlife. A range of religious ideas and values likely had a profound influence on their viewpoints and the government they established, but the historical record finds little evidence that the United States was founded to be a distinctively Christian nation.

[1] David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46.